Artforum International

An international contemporary art magazine covering sculpture, painting, mixed media, and installation works, as well as architecture, music, and popular culture. Includes artist interviews and reviews of individual artists and/or galleries; reviews of fi

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Articles from Vol. 38, No. 8, April

Adam Chodzko

THE BRITISH SCHOOL Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, the last film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, was released shortly before the writer-director was murdered in 1975. Violent, at times unbearable, sorrowfully poetic, the film explores the psychopathology...

PACEWILDENSTEIN Antoni Tapies's oeuvre has always been divided against itself, and now, in this old-age work--the artist is almost eighty--the split is more evident than ever. On the one hand, there are works like Llit vermell (Red bed), 1998 relatively...

There's a group of girls in New York that I photograph regularly. They call me all the time and talk about their moms and share ideas for photos. I have some clothes in the back of my car and ask that they wear their scruffiest things. I want them...

GEORG SCHOLLHAMMER ON THE AUSTRIAN BOYCOTT DEBATE THE VIENNA SECESSION has put its distinctive facade--one of the most photographed tourist attractions in the city--at the disposal of artists like Franz West and Renee Green for work critical of...

Catherine Kinley has an appetite for the new. For the past twenty-two years she has researched, advised on, catalogued, documented, and displayed the Tate's holdings, always with an eye for innovative programming and "learning as we go." Currently...

GAGOSIAN GALLERY I sense a backlash building after Cecily Brown's numerous recent appearances in the popular press as an avatar of a sort of painting that is stylistically familiar yet modishly edgy in subject. What's unfortunate is that she's been...

Sophie Calle's work has appeared in a range of media and formats, from a major French daily to a Manhattan telephone booth. As "The True Stories of Sophie Calle" goes on view in Kassel and the artist's book Double Game appears, contributing editor...

Though born and raised in Germany, Christoph Grunenberg views his appointment at Tate Modern as something of a homecoming. After serving for nearly half a decade as acting director of the ICA in Boston, Grunenberg is returning to the city where he...

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART Cornelia Parker first came to public attention in 1988 by arranging for a steamroller to level a scavenged collection of silver objects to create the raw materials for a large-scale sculpture. Since then, melting, slicing,...

GREENE NAFTALI Daniela Rossell's repugnant yet alluring photographs of nouveaux riches theatrically posed in the tacky opulence of their homes expose a lack that gnaws at the heart of wealth. In "All the best names are taken," her first solo show...

ENTWISTLE GALLERY The main gallery at Entwistle is your typical art space--boxy and white, with a stonelike tile floor and a big window onto the street. A false wall runs across part of this window, but enough of it remains clear to allow the space...

GALERIE LELONG / JOHN GIBSON Donald Lipski has steadfastly bucked the waves of Conceptualism that have refueled sculpture during the last two decades. Apart from grouping his idiosyncratic renderings according to the most general object- or process-related...

"Success is a job in New York," but London's even better. Despite a fulfilling three-and-a-half-year stint as a curator-at-large for Ohio's forward-thinking Wexner Center for the Arts, Donna De Salvo might have admitted, if pressed, that the Warholian...

DILAPIDATED WAREHOUSES, abandoned industrial buildings, disused retail spaces--these would seem to be staples of the international postwar avant-garde milieu. In New York in the '50s and '60s such premises hosted Happenings, Warhol's Factory, and the...

How does Emma Dexter (director of exhibitions at London's Institute of Contemporary Art from 1992 to last year) fit into Tate Modern's radical plans? In appointing Dexter to work alongside Iwona Blazwick, Frances Morris, and Donna De Salvo, Lars Nittve...

HUGE POOLS OF SOUNDS coming from one undifferentiated tone: This is the dizzying, precision work of Charlemagne Palestine and a Dutch organ, stretched out for seventy-one minutes. The single note sounded gives rise to more notes, a sustained single...

Since joining the staff in 1997, Frances Morris's main responsibility has been to develop a scheme for the hanging of the permanent collection. A harrying task? Surprisingly, Morris describes the early stages of this process as a luxury. It was a year...

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NORTH MIAMI Frank Stella is too much. His art and career have always been outsize in every sense, from the less-than-zero "Black Paintings" of 1959--60 to the giant, Day-Glo late-'60s "Protractor" series and wild relief...

LILJEVALCHS KONSTHALL, STOCKHOLM Art history has never been about who got there first, but who took it to the bank first. The fact that Swedish painter Hilma af Klint was already fully immersed in automatic drawing by 1903, nineteen years before...

IMAGINE IT'S THE YEAR 1403 or 652 or whenever it was they invented paper. The inventors of paper are running through the streets, and they're shouting, "Hey! We've got this paper stuff--it's new! It's exciting! Give us something to put onto it! Give...

Each period casts a very long shadow. One's period is when one is very young. --Diana Vreeland THE SUMMER OF LOVE GAME LATE TO THE VINEYARD. WHEN IT DID, IT HIT HARD. That summer Ali MacGraw died in Ryan O'Neal's arms after warming his cold,...

In the late '70s Iwona Blazwick, who was trained as an artist, had an epiphany: "I found myself overwhelmed by what I was looking at." She gave up her career making art and decided instead to attend full time to the work of others. With an academic...

MITCHELL-INNES &amp; NASH, NEW YORK Of all the American artists who caught the mid-century disease known as Willem de Kooning, none had it earlier, longer, or less profoundly than Jack Tworkov. At least that is one way to diagnose the recent exhibition...

FEIGEN CONTEMPORARY Jeanne Dunning's photographic career has involved an extended investigation of corporeality. Since 1987 her work has tended to cluster into two groups: those' images in which the familiar is made foreign by the addition of what...

In describing the Tate Modern building, its displays, and its exhibition program, Jennifer Mundy chooses words that emphasize both contrast and congeniality. The plant might look brutal and industrial from the outside, but inside it is surprisingly...

The Tate Gallery has become something of a British Guggenheim in its ambitions: Divide and conquer. Though less globe-trotting than its American colleague, the Tate's four showplaces now boast some 350,000 square feet of exhibition space in which to...

PALACIO DE VELAZQUEZ/MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFIA "Flashback," curated by James Lingwood, was one of the most important exhibitions in Juliao Sarmento's career, affording a retrospective view of twenty-five years of the artist's work....

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY Both Keith Edmier and Richard Phillips are interested in popular memory of the '60S and early '70S and in exacting formal procedures that tweak realism toward something outlandish. Centering on Edmier's sculptures, with...

ROEBLING HALL To say that K.K. Kozik is primarily an imagemaker rather than a painter does not mean her images could exist just as easily in some other medium. In their fusion of the fantastic and banal into a quirky but immediately recognizable...

GALERIE OTTO SCHWEINS A dead man, a soldier, is lying on the floor. He's on his back, his legs outstretched. A brown branch that appears to originate from an unusual plant is boring its way through his head. It's like an old horror film: brutal,...

In the early '90s, I asked the astute British critic Stuart Morgan what he thought of the work of Lars Nittve, then director of the Rooseum in Malmo. "Well," said Stuart, "he won't be in Malmo for long." And Nittve's ascendant career trajectory, culminating...

GALLERIA MARABINI If it still made sense to speak of abstract art, Letizia Galli's paintings would have to be called abstract. In her captivating chromatic compositions, often set against a background as black as icy space, galaxies of colors with...

ONE FOR THE BOOKS To the Editor: Philip Leider is dead wrong in his understanding of Donald Judd's concept of "singleness" ["Perfect Unlikeness," February 2000]. Judd's aesthetic of singleness did not derive from Malevich, as Leider claims, nor...

DAVID BEITZEL GALLERY The nightmarishly fascinating thing about race is that it's at once real and unreal, social fact and anthropological nonentity. In the US, of course, the issue of race is everywhere, and yet the art world generally fails to...

METRO PICTURES With Something About Time and Space But I'm Not Sure What It Is, 1998, Conceptual photographer Louise Lawler deftly resolves the dilemma that confronts every artist at midcareer: how to build on past successes without simply repeating...

MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA "Superyo congelado" (Frozen superego) spans forty years of Luis Gordillo's career. Born in 1934, Gordillo has been a central figure in Spanish art from the '60s on, though he is far less well known abroad--a...

JOYCE THEATER Meredith Monk's performances have always been richly metaphorical collages of live and projected imagery, moving bodies, and powerful voices. Magic Frequencies, 1999, is a far more painterly work of visual theater. With its layers...

MATT'S GALLERY Freud, in a much-cited passage from The Uncanny (1919), describes getting lost in a maze of unfamiliar city streets and returning time and again to the same place--the red-light district. The Coral Reef repeats on visitors in like...

In the collective imagination lipstick represents romanticism and sensuality, and it should come as no surprise that various artists have used its image in their work to subvert those very notions. Claes Oldenburg's postcard Lipsticks in Piccadilly...

"Sometimes I see [an artwork] so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave." It was this kind of feeling (expressed by Nick Shay, one of the narrators...

Paul Moorhouse, a Tate curator for fifteen years, has the enviable role of collections-department specialist in British contemporary art. Currently he is responsible for about ten of the specially themed exhibitions to launch Tate Modern. "Installing...

GRIFFIN CONTEMPORARY Richard Long tends to be a bit predictable--another ring of rocks, another circle of mud. If you were to find someone unfamiliar with his work, you could make an easy penny by wagering just before entering a Long exhibition...

SPERONE WESTWATER In this culture of big spectacle and loud noise, it's inevitable that understatement and beautifully modest production will come to be valued, if only by certain cults. Richard Tuttle certainly qualifies as a high priest in this...

ON DECEMBER 22, 1999, ROBERT BRESSON, THE DIRECTOR OF THIRTEEN LAPIDARY FEATURE FILMS, DIED AT THE AGE OF NINETY-EIGHT. OVER THE COURSE OF A CAREER THAT SPANNED HALF A CENTURY, BRESSON HONED A LACONIC, INTENSELY PERSONAL STYLE THAT HAS INFLUENCED FILMMAKERS...

MARK MOORE GALLERY Sabina Ott exhibited for years in Los Angeles before an audience that generally failed to greet her work with the enthusiasm it deserved. Recently, however, there has been great excitement about the emergence of a handful of LA...

GALERIE BARBARA THUMM The boundaries between private and public space are fluid. Shopping malls, administrative buildings, and government service centers are becoming festivalized places with attached restaurants, movies, and round-the-clock bars,...

Sean Rainbird, a specialist in contemporary German art, plays a key role in the Tate Modern team. Among his many responsibilities as a veteran Tate Collections curator are the planning and installation of new displays of the museum's permanent and...

GALERIE FRIEDRICH A broad, loosely constructed platform of raw lattice and boards stands chest high at the entrance to the gallery. On it are grouped many hand-sized pigment-objects--layered polychrome cloth rectangles; squares poured in strict...

TBA EXHIBITION SPACE The title of Stephen Lapthisophon's exhibition, "Defense d'Afficher," refers to signs forbidding the posting of printed materials on public walls ("post no bills"). But a deliberate mistranslation (typical of Lapthisophon's...

WHEN THE TATE GALLERY OF Modern Art opens the doors of the transformed Bankside Power Station to the public on May 12, the international museum landscape will never be the same. Comparisons between the central London institution's debut and the opening...

THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY OF THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART This exhibition offered the perfect opportunity to overturn cliches about modernism in the periphery. Featuring the work of five of the most relevant South American avant-garde artists of...

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK To how many of us is it given to attend the birth of a medium and to witness its institutionalization as--what else?--an "art form"? In the early '60s, anyone who held in his or her hands a brown, flexible,...

Lunapark 0.10, released as part of the "Aural Documents" series by the Belgian label Sub Rosa, is more like a seance than a CD. Compiled by Marc Dachy, this spoken-word anthology begins with the ghostly voice of Apollinaire declaiming his poem "Le...

1 AL GREEN AT THE NBA ALLSTAR GAME It was not a well-known thing, that the Reverend Al Green would be singing the national anthem in the Oakland Arena before this particular All-Star Game. His presence was not indicated on the ticket, nor advertised...

MOORE COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN, PHILADELPHIA/GASSER &amp; GRUNERT, NEW YORK In 1967, when Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to Valie Export and began producing public performance pieces as a fellow traveler of the Viennese Actionists, notoriety...